I suspect many will disagree with how I categorized this story. I don't feel it fits well into any of the categories perfectly.
The sex depicted is hetero and everyone is over 18.
LarryInSeattle bears the burden of dealing with my mistakes. Give him a hand and let me know, politely please, what works and what doesn't.
I hope you enjoy the story.
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As the elevator's strangely sexy robotic voice intoned the passing floors, I tried hard not to get my hopes up. She wasn't there every day, not even most days. She might not even be working today. Or maybe, facing a meeting deadline, she was still at her desk, foregoing her morning break. I hadn't seen her yesterday. It wasn't impossible to imagine that I'd never see her again. People move, take new jobs, or change their habits, nothing is constant.
The ever helpful elevator announced we had reached the mezzanine and that she (the elevator had a female voice) was "going down". The bitch is a tease. I joined the crush of bodies exiting the elevator. Like some primordial slime mold, we split into three tendrils. Some headed for the part of the plaza reserved for the smokers in the building. Another group arced toward the bakery, which my scale had been telling me to avoid, and the largest, the tendril of bodies I moved with, headed toward Starbucks.
My heart, already pounding, kicked up a notch. She was in the line waiting for her coffee, or chia or whatever it was she drank.
The Starbucks was well acquainted with the mass of caffeine freaks that surged out of the elevators this time of day. They were staffed and ready. Many of us, longtime regulars, had our drinks waiting. I quickly made it up to the counter, touched my phone to the credit card reader, and was rewarded with my small dark-chocolate-skim-mocha-no-whip. I knew where she sat. The tables were strangely unoccupied, despite the throngs of people who a short time earlier had crowded the area. The majority returned to their offices, to sip and browse or sip and work at their desks.
She did not. She always walked around to the left, to a narrow curved tail of the mezzanine that overlooked the atrium and only had room for two tables. There were plenty of open tables but my brain was on fire. I had considered approaching her since I first spotted her weeks ago but more recently my interest and courage had been sparked enough for me to take action.
I ought to pause for a moment and make something perfectly clear. I'm not a stalker. I had certainly noticed her. I was certainly interested in her. And I had recently decided to make my interest known but if rebuffed, that would be the end of it. Oh, no doubt she'd linger in memory and fantasies but I would not push it. I would offer but I would not pursue.
"Hi, mind if I join you?" I asked but taking a seat before she had time to reply. She looked more startled than annoyed. I took that as a good sign. "You work at Massey?" Massey, a title company, was the primary occupant of the floor she exited the elevator on.
"Huh? Um, no. Peabody's," she replied. Her face remained free of irritation, not at all the look mine would have shown if a stranger plopped their ass down at my table in a mostly empty room. Peabody's was a small independent publisher that had to be a pet project of someone with a lot of money. There was no way they made enough in publishing to cover the rent, much less employees.
"Cool. You a writer?"
"No. Copy editor."
The spark that lead to me sitting here occurred earlier in the week. I was behind her at Starbucks. She had an e-reader in hand. I wasn't trying to be nosy but I found myself reading over her shoulder. She was reading a smut novel. Torrid prose, lots of sighs and moans, the type of book my mother called "bodice rippers". My mom had had a stack of them that she would never let me read. I was amused that a woman who turned up her nose at a French kiss on one of her soap operas enjoyed reading smutty romance novels. As my eyes skimmed the page I realized whatever Ms. 10th Floor was reading, it was a step beyond a romance novel. My eyes hopped from "cock" and "thrusting manhood" to "pussy". This was straight-up porn.